U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,545, assigned to the Assignee of the present application, discloses a system and method for performing secure investigations of networked devices over a computer network. Part of such investigation entails the searching of one or more secondary storage devices for specific patterns or data. According to one prior art mechanism, an examining machine downloads the data to be searched from the networked devices and searches the data for specific patterns locally at the examining machine. Clearly, such a mechanism wastes bandwidth and resources of the examining machine.
Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method in a computer investigations system for efficiently searching secondary storage devices for specific data patterns during an online investigation of those devices.